Re: Exploring a code base?

[Gregory Heytings via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

>
> Maybe you could step back and describe in a bit more detail what kind of 
> workflow you are trying to support, and how that contributes to the kind 
> of code-base exploring job you have in mind.  I do this quite a lot, and 
> IME a combination of M-. and M-? (with the latter using the back-end of 
> ID Utils, if possible) is entirely adequate.  In particular, I don't 
> think I ever was in the need of some graph to refactor a data type, I 
> only needed to examine its uses.
>
> Basically, I'm asking why having a flat list of all the users of a data 
> type, and reading the code of all of them, is not enough for this kind 
> of job?  What am I missing?
>

IIUC, Yuri, Stefan and Dmitry all described the same problem, each with 
their own words: using M-. and M-? works fine for simple tasks (say, 
change the name of a given function or struct field in a codebase, or see 
where a given type is used), but when you are tackling a more complex task 
you often have to put searches on a kind of "stack", on which you can save 
your current search state, and from which you can resume your current 
search at a later stage. Say, you are making changes to the occurrences of 
"foo", and at some point during that work you see that you need to change 
something around the occurrences of "bar", and at some point during that 
work you see that you need to change the occurrences of "baz", and so 
forth.